Tag Archives: computers

Well, folks, it’s Thursday, so we’ve got yet another Sign of the End Times. This time, Pat Robertson has discovered that electronic payments are the Mark of the Beast. We always thought it was UPC codes, but apparently, no, it’s electronic banking, and maybe also RFID chips, and for all we know, probably immigration reform too. You see, the End Times Preppers are always on the lookout for the Mark of the Beast, which the Book of Revelation says is going to have to be on your wrist or your forehead, but which really could be any universal technology involved in buying and selling. (Yes, there are some folks who insist that government-issued currency is the Mark, since Walmart doesn’t take gold. And Germany doesn’t even hide it! Look what they call their money!!1!) Read more on Pat Robertson Introduces This Nice Lady Who Writes Nice Children’s Books About The Mark Of The Beast…

The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams takes Fox News at its word when it says racism isn’t a problem anymore, but that does leave her wondering why 100% of people bitten by police dogs in LA County were black or Latino. So she asks a dog trainer the obvious question: “Is that because we taste better?” You won’t believe the lengths the trainer goes to in trying to make excuses for the blatant racism of a cute little doggie named Walter. But it’s not just dogs — turns out that computers are racist, too. Just see what happens when you google “Why are black people”…
Read more on The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams Has Had It With These Racist Dogs (Video)…

Great Britain has made a small step toward correcting one of the great injustices of the postwar era — not that it can ever be made right, of course — and has issued a posthumous pardon and apology to Alan Turing, the genius who helped break the German “Enigma” code during WWII and who pretty much invented the basis for programmable computers. Turing only made one small mistake: he was gay in England in the middle of the last century, and after he was convicted of “gross indecency” for loving another man, he was sentenced to chemical castration, which almost certainly led to his suicide in 1954. You know, one of those unfortunate side effects of protecting the traditional family.
Read more on Great Britain Pardons Father Of Modern Computing And Nerd Icon Alan Turing, For Gay…

It’s getting to where political correctness is just ruining everything, isn’t it? ABA Journal reports that
Court officials in DeKalb County, Ga., acted quickly after learning that an online jury form listed “slave” as a possible occupation.
They add that the choice was deleted from the drop-down menu within an hour after a teevee news reporter contacted the court, so good on court administrator Cathy McCumber and the IT team — that’s a better turnaround time than a lot of organizations would manage for a password reset request. Read more on Georgia Jurors Don’t Have Option To State Occupation As ‘Slave’ Anymore, Obamacare Probably To Blame…

Avast (that shows that I’m no land-lubber, cuz I said avast), ye scurvy snarky dogs, the wanton wireless wastrels have continued their campaign of theft. And, as shown to me by the minor shitstorm (a manure monsoon, if you will. Or a fecal flurry) that occurred in the comments of my last kolumn, it is actually a serious problem, a problem that most teenz do not take seriously. I will admit to being one of the many who saw it as the gray area of gray areas, the gray area to rule them all. However, after you good Wonkaptains set me straight last week, I have plotted a course away from that line of thinking. How do we solve this problem? As the philosopher once said, “Damned if I know.” But I think there are ways to get teenz to stop doing it. Maybe. Read more on Teen Korner For Teenz: Digital Coast Guard Edition…

Well, it’s finally happening to non-Poors too: high-income IT workers are now being replaced by Indian workers who will agree to work for less pay and no benefits. Welcome to the future, where the only jobs left will be upper upper management, service, and court jester crap (i.e., Louis C.K., Lady Gaga, Girltalk, etc).
Read more on Prepare For Your Newest Reason For Getting Laid Off, America: You Just Got Insourced!…

Drones! Or, as they are affectionately called, “Flying Killer Robots!” Apparently they are coming soon to American airspace and they will fix everything, from pollution in Nebraska to checking out pirates to fighting fires! So what is NOT to like about domestic drones, maybe that’s the better question! Except for the tiny little problem of them being completely vulnerable to hacking and hijacking by colleges students, that’s all, just a tiny problem, nothing to worry about.
Read more on Students Successfully Hijack Domestic Flying Killer Robot…

Unloved corporate failure Meg Whitman was last seen insisting that she should be governor of California because goddammit, she paid $141 million to be governor of California. And now the former eBay executive has re-appeared on the public stage, with news that she will be hired to run the ruined tech company Hewlett Packard. The rumor/announcement was greeted by a global plunge in all stocks, led by a collapse in all technology shares. Why can’t she just leave Earth alone? Aren’t things bad enough without Meg Whitman? Read more on Stocks Collapse Worldwide On News About Meg Whitman…

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said on Wednesday that Goldman Sachs “misled investors selling mortgage-backed investments it knew would fail” and that executives from the bank had also “misled Congress in a testimony given in 2010.” And now all the thieving, lying bankers who ruined America will be sent to Bagram Fun Palace. Just kidding! The New York Times has a million-word story explaining how federal investigators tried so hard to find a way to prosecute Goldman Sachs and all the other banks, but just couldn’t! (Seriously!) According to the NYT Business Section, trying to figure out why all these white rich guys who control our government weren’t convicted of financial malfeasance is “the equivalent of determining why a dog did not bark — is anything but simple.” Ha-ha. Okay? Here is a news article about a 25-year-old mother of four who was sentenced to ten years in prison for selling $31 of weed. Why was she sent to prison? Because she stole billions of dollars and lied about it to the United States Senate. (She wasn’t friends with Henry Paulson, though!) Embarrassing. [NYT] Read more on Banker-Controlled Government Can’t Figure Out How To Prosecute Bankers…
Read more on Banker-Controlled Government Can’t Figure Out How To Prosecute Bankers…

Mother Jones is apparently looking through the public records of the lame Republican presidential candidates these days (maybe THEY can figure out which of those Trump birth certificates/strands of hair are real), and they hit a snag when they requested Mike Huckabee’s from his time as governor of Arkansas. Apparently Mike Huckabee never was governor of Arkansas, as there is no evidence of it; it was all destroyed, according to the office of the current governor. “Moreover, at that time, all of the computers used by former Governor Huckabee and his staff had already been removed from the office and, as we understand it, the hard-drives in those computers had already been ‘cleaned’ and physically destroyed,” they wrote. Thanks to Huck sitting on all his hard drives to crush them, the world may never know what kind of porn he likes. Read more on Mike Huckabee Destroyed All Evidence He Ever Used a Computer…

Salaam, and a very merry DAY OF RAGE to you! Did you forget to buy your girlfriend something nice for this Day of Rage? (Of course not, because who has a girlfriend?) That’s okay, just burn down a police station, in honor of how much you dislike Libya’s weirdo sorta-king thingy, Muammar Gaddafi. Yes! Libyan security forces killed two demonstrators yesterday, which is probably why much larger, angrier protests have erupted in four different cities across Libya today. And now Libyans are just cold torchin’ police stations and generally not taking shit from anybody. [Al Jazeera] Read more on Libyan Protesters Call For ‘Day of Rage’…
Read more on Libyan Protesters Call For ‘Day of Rage’…

Will Al Jazeera be accused of “surprise sex” for its release of thousands of “Palestine Papers” detailing the dirty deals of the Middle East peace process? That’s the question some blogger somewhere is probably writing a long post about, right now, as the world’s governments groan and shudder like a weary whore under the weight of these endless document dumps. What have we learned about the Israel-Palestinian thirty-year back and forth over recognition and return and all that? Eh, everybody’s corrupt and each government does little more than sell out its own people, ha ha, what did you think? Read more on ‘Palestine Papers’ Leak Causes Chaos; Whole World Now Leaking Away…

Joe Miller lied about computers. What does this even mean? It means Joe says he’s never heard of computers, when in fact he has used computers several times, for all sorts of unethical things. (He wrongly used a computer for “political purposes,” and not for sending Animal P0rno to Carl Paladino? Weird.) Poor Joe Miller probably suffers from OCD, and has to lock-unlock-lock his door thirty times and then lie about something before he can leave the house. “OCD” is actually the war disability that Joe Miller lied about having, in order to receive his monthly Army Welfare Check. See? It’s a dangerous cycle. Pretty soon Joe Miller is going to start lying about everything, even if these things have nothing to do with his joke-campaign: “Hey Joe, is this your sandwich?” “Nope, I don’t even know what sandwiches are.” Then you eat the sandwich and Joe is all, “What the heck? That was my sandwich!” And then Joe Miller will arrest you. [AP/The Caucus] Read more on Joe Miller Admits He Lies About Everything, Even ‘Computers’…
Read more on Joe Miller Admits He Lies About Everything, Even ‘Computers’…

So a bunch of fancy world leaders gathered at Davos to discuss the “world economy,” such as it is, and generally be lame together this year. The “headliners” were such sexy globe-trotting humanitarian starlets as Vladimir Putin and Wen Jiabao. Putin said something mean to Michael Dell, because that is something Putin loves doing: publicly humiliating dopey Americans. Read more on Putin Makes Rude Remark At Davos…

A Wonkette publishing operative has sent us this leaked letter (.PDF) from the Workman Publishing Co., publishers of the new book “Is This Thing On?”: A Computer Handbook for Late Bloomers, Technophobes, and the Kicking & Screaming, to McCain deputy e-campaign director Mark Soohoo. The P.R. person writes that folks are being unfair with McCain by calling him “computer illiterate,” and appears to think there’s a chance Walnuts might accept an offer to do a “special one-on-one training session” with the book’s author. Our favorite line: “Mr. McCain mentioned that he liked reading Politico.com, so he is certainly no novice.” [Letter (.PDF)]
Read more on Computer Handbook Publisher Wants To Help John McCain, Personally!…

Oh come now, will everyone please stop pickin’ on poor John McCain for his limited knowledge of the future techmologies? This is something that irks political writers on the Internet to a strange degree (probably because it means McCain cannot give them page views.) Even McCain’s best friend Jon Chait of The New Republic has been calling him “President Grampa Simpson,” which is Ageist. While many of us are more concerned about McCain for other reasons — the fact that he is solidly to the right of George W. Bush on foreign policy, for example — we understand how problematic it would be to have a president who uses Yahoo! instead of Google. And yet it’s still hilarious whenever McCain tries to defend his technological know-how to a crowd of nerds, as he did yesterday in liberal San Francisco. Read more on John McCain Is So Adorable When He Talks About The Internet…

Here is a video clip of John McCain declaring that he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class in the Naval Academy. This is supposed to make all you elitists turn purple with rage that such a terrible slacker would ever dare to run for president, when in fact it just shows that John McCain was cool, once: too cool for school, in fact, in the years before school was officially invented. The bit about his wife having to turn on his computer for him is just embarrassing, though. [YouTube via AmericaBlog]
Read more on John McCain, Gentleman Scholar…

It’s time to stop with all this “John McCain is from the 18th Century” nonsense, because the GOP nominee-to-be has now seen a computer and is quickly catching up with all the exciting technological developments of the past 45 years. Read more on John McCain Looked at the Computer!…

Think of something useless and trendy — something that wastes your time while adding absolutely nothing to your life or work while simultaneously exposing your identity and private information and whatever you’re doing at the moment to a world of sinister strangers who only want to steal your ID and rape you. Right, we are talking about Facebook, which is a sort of web-based rolodex that anybody can look at, on the Internet. IT’S A WEB 2.7 SENSATION OMFG IT’S ON THE COVER OF NEWSWEEK!!1!
Now, think about the most inappropriate possible industry to combine with a Facebook-style application. If you guessed “U.S. intelligence services” then go ahead and appoint yourself “spy czar” or whatever because you are right. And we are fucked.
Read more on Valerie Plame Added You As A Friend On Spookbook…

It’s a good thing all the Iraq war plans are totally useless — otherwise our Determined Enemies might learn something from all the supposedly Top Secret documents just sitting on web servers that anybody can access.
Read more on Pentagon Can’t Even Give Away Its Secret War Plans…

Following this week’s tragic revelation of 800 cyber-attacks on the the Homeland Security department, evil computer monsters have now attacked the Pentagon’s computer networks. Some 1,500 PCs at DoD were shut down during the latest “penetration of the system,” in the romantic wording of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Read more on Everybody On Earth Hacking the Pentagon For the Hell of It…

Nothing says American labor unions are in permanent decline like this memo from the Tech Support Desk at the National Labor Relations Board. This helpful instruction sheet was attached to an e-mail that read, “Several NLRB employees have asked us to furnish instructions on how to logoff. Those instructions are attached.”
Read more on Washington Bureaucrats: Dumb as a Box of Hair…